A couple things:
1. The Japanese Navy had a deep schizm; On the one hand there were the older admirals who loved battleships and saw aircraft carriers are uppity contraptions not to be trusted.
On the other hand were folks like Yamamoto —the CARRIER was the new center of navy power.
PH was an air operation, and Yamamoto was in ultimate charge. However Yamamoto was not actually ON SCENE —the person on-scene was a Battleship guy (Nagumo) who still didn’t fully accept the crazy idea of airplanes landing on ships —after the 2nd wave got back safe and sound, he ordered the fleet to withdraw.
In fact all the aircraft carrier people violently urged a 3rd (and even more) waves —they were amazed with their level of success and saw the inertia still in their hands. They wanted to exploit it even further —how about the dry docks? How about the oil facilities? These were left untouched.
If they didn’t have the crusty battleship admirals along, what would have happened?
My view is in fact the US got off MUCH easier than could have been the case.
2. Almost ALL Japanese Navy admirals expected that after the PH attack the fleet would engage in ship-to-ship combat with the US navy immediately off of Hawaii and they FULLY EXPECTED to lose 50% OF THEIR ATTACKING FLEET..!!!
Their level of air success was amazing, but what amazed them even more was that there was NO navy engagement —they got away scott-free.
Some more weird facts:
1. HAWAIIAN *LAND* FIREFIGHT..?! — there was a very small gun-battle on the ground on a small isolated island —a Japanese flier crashed there. News wasn’t quite then what it is now, and the people there (I think the island was Nihau, or something) weren’t yet aware of the Oahu attack. The flier used his gun and amity with some Japanese Americans on the island to try to take it over.
All Japanese fliers had been given a map to this small island, telling them that this might be a good divert if they had been 2 badly shot-up to return to the carriers.
The plan was that a sub would later pick them up, there.
2. ESCAPED MINI SUB? They found one of the mini subs substantially intact, and some speculate that the “suicide submariners” may have beached, escaped and blended in with the very large Japanese populace on Oahu. No one really knows how it ended for those guys.